Nice shot Mark ! I liked the 3rd pic - the small DOF makes it stand out quite well - though I think it was slightly off-focus. Or maybe my eye-sight not up to standard.
The colours are amazing though - any processing done ? or is it Just Natural from the camera. !

Hi David and thanks for your comments, I love the DOF on the 3rd one too. Yeah it's not as sharp as it could be. I was shooting continuously in the hope that one would hit the mark and they were moving and flying here and there so quickly that it was hard to actually pin one down and this one came the closest.

Sadly the colours didn't come naturally, I increased saturation and contrast in Photoshop.

You mentioned in my other thread that Sanya was your ancestral home, I'd be interested to hear more about that, have you been here before or does the connection go very far back? I have a friend from the UK who came here 15 years ago and she said that the main beach, Yalong Bay was just a beach and there were no big hotels. Today, the Sheraton, Hilton, Marriott etc are all here! Fortunately commercialism hasn't gone too wild though and the whole place is still quite unspoilt.....for now!!

Anyway, back to the butterflies, there's a place here called Butterfly Valley which I'm going to visit in the next day or two and it is supposed to have the most beautiful species of butterflies so that will give me some good practice on DOF and focusing.

Went to this place called Butterfly Valley yesterday and had a pretty disastrous time with my pics I took about 150 and could only use very few of them because I was concentrating on DOF too much and forgot about shutter speed. I was taking pics and looking at them afterwards and even zooming in and they looked fine, but as soon as I uploaded them, blur was obvious.

I wonder, how do people compromise between DOF and shutter speed? I left my camera on aperture priority and only later realised that as I was shooting moving objects....and these butterflies wouldn't stay still for a second!...that I should have used shutter priority instead....stupid!

Anyway, here's the few sharpest ones of the butterflies and a lizard I saw: